6.11.2007

Morreu Rorty:(

A questão não é saber quem sou mas sabermos quem somos, como enfatiza Haraway. Mas foi Rorty quem primeiro chamou a atenção para a necessidade de substituir um falsamente neutro príncipio da objectividade por um de solidariedade:"There are two principal ways in which reflective human beings try, (...)to give sense to those lives. The first is by telling the story of their contribution to a community. This community may be the actual historical one in which they live, or another actual one, distant in tyme or place, or a quite imaginary one(...). The second way is to describe themselves as standing in immediate relation to a nonhuman reality. This relation is immediate in the sense that it does not derive from a relation between such a reality and their tribe(...). I shall say that stories of the former kind exemplify the desire for solidarity,and that stories of the latter kind exemplify the desire for objectivity."Isto porque a primazia deve ser dada à ética e não à, também falsamente neutra, ontologia:"But the pragmatist does not have a theory of truth, much less a relativist one. As a partisan of solidarity, his account of the value of cooperative human inquiry has only an ethical base, not an epistemological or metaphysical one. Not having any epistemology, a fortiori he does not have a relativist one."E, nessa conversa sobre quem somos e quem devemos ser, a literatura vai, pelo menos, a par da filosofia, e muito à frente da ciência:"I think that Feyerabend is right in suggesting that untill we discard the metaphor of inquiry, and human activity generally, as converging rather than proliferating(...) we shall never be free of the motives which led us to posit gods. (...)If we could ever be moved solely by the desire of solidarity(...) then we should think of human progress as making it possible for human beings to do more interesting things and be more interesting people(...). Our self-image would employ images of making rather than finding,the images used by Romantics to praise poets rather than the images used by the greeks to praise mathematicians."